Performance and compatibility

Plug in and play, or plug in and start praying?

All of the distributions that we tested seemed well suited to running on slower hardware.

AntiX didn’t want to boot on our old laptop until we added the acpi=off kernel parameter in the GRUB bootloader. Following that, AntiX booted to the desktop, but couldn’t set the screen resolution correctly, because the correct modes weren’t available. In the virtual machine, hardware detection worked correctly. Once booted, running free -h in a terminal showed 390MB in use, which is pretty impressive.

EasyOS wasn’t perfect in the area of hardware detection either. We were never able to get sound output to work on the old laptop. It looked as though the sound was playing, but no sound actually came out of the speaker. On another laptop, the trackpad was detected, but we had to press down unusually hard. Memory usage was 224MB on boot. EasyOS felt even snappier than the others in most areas.

Porteus detected all hardware correctly and used 481MB when booted from the live flash drive. Linux Lite also found all of the hardware correctly on the laptop. It’s not a huge deal, but it used a bit more RAM than some other distros at 649MB on a fresh boot.

Ubuntu, equipped with Gnome 3, running in live mode used 1.2GB of RAM, which is quite a lot more than the others, and it might be worth bearing in mind if you intend to use your flash drive on low-end, older hardware. It wasn’t slow, but we felt it wasn’t quite as snappily responsive as the other desktops when running on the laptop. All hardware was detected and configured.